A Candid Look at Monument Making

If you’ve been wintering in Mauritania and haven’t heard of the new Getty Center, here’s your chance to catch up.

Millions of motorists have traveled the 405 Freeway through the Sepulveda Pass unaware of the intense skirmishes being fought over the sprawling edifice taking spectacular shape on the Brentwood hilltop overlooking the daily gridlock.

In that regard, the oft-unflattering candor of tonight’s “Concert of Wills: Making the Getty Center” is remarkable, given that this fascinating, mesmerizing, artful documentary, from Albert Maysles, Susan Froemke and Bob Eisenhardt, was commissioned by none other than the Getty Trust.

You needn’t be art-smart to get a big kick out of “Concert of Wills” and its spirit of openness.

KCET-TV Channel 28 is hardly airing it in a publicity vacuum. The new Getty Center began capturing the eye of both national and Los Angeles media well in advance of Tuesday’s public opening. Local stations have come up with a host of advance stories, with KCBS-TV Channel 2 making the strongest TV effort last week with a pair of special programs from the complex (one of them tailored to kids)--the intent presumably not being to sneak a camera into the Getty kitchen.

On Tuesday, KCET’s “Life & Times” took its own tour of the place, with host (and Los Angeles Times staff writer) Patt Morrison wearing shades outside as protection from Getty glare. And on Friday the station airs “Robert Irwin: The Beauty of Questions,” an interesting film tracing the twisty artistic journey of the man who created the new Getty’s Central Garden, and whose clashes over it with Modernist architect Richard Meier are central to “Concert of Wills.” The unity implicit in the film’s title apparently was slow in arriving.

It’s hard to locate an angle from which to photograph the Getty that doesn’t produce stunning images, so dramatic are the gleaming, multifaceted campus, its physical setting and its intersections of light and shadows. This film’s greatest asset, though, is not its undeniably striking pictures, but its un-narrated portrait, in cinema verite style, of the new Getty’s collaborative evolution as human drama, with the absolute control sought by the renowned Meier gradually slipping away as others join him at the canvas.

You literally see that happen, as well as the simmering acrimony it produces--especially between the architect and Irwin, who is famed for his “art in public places.”

Although Irwin at one point here answers Meier’s theories with a definitive “bull----” and Meier later dismisses Irwin’s valley of gardens as “a disaster,” these are generally amiable disputes in which everyone wears frozen, Jerry Falwell smiles. If this is what’s on camera, though, you can only speculate about what may have occurred when the lens wasn’t present.

The Getty wars are likened by museum director John Walsh in the documentary to “rival armies coming together.” His own fundamental disagreements with Meier over the museum’s interior also are recorded in the film, with Meier comparing his association with Walsh to “a long marriage” through which he’d hoped to persuade Walsh to be “less conservative” regarding the new Getty’s galleries. Meier adds: “And he thought he was going to get me to become conservative.”

Neither side triumphed, although Walsh says each influenced the other: “We’ve accepted things in his buildings that were surprises to us [in how] they worked out better than we thought.”

Viewers can judge for themselves, even though the film’s omission of previous Meier buildings for comparison makes that more difficult. Nor is there more than fleeting mention--surprisingly, given the film’s emphasis on aesthetics--of those neat-looking, visitor-filled hillside trams snaking their way to and from the Getty.

Otherwise, this is definitely a ride worth taking, an eavesdropping, chronological account covering nearly a dozen years, starting when the new Getty was little more than a dream atop a hill, and advancing across the 1990s, when somehow it became a physical work in progress while still a concept in progress.

“It’s going to give Los Angeles its acropolis,” Times art critic William Wilson predicts here in the early stages of planning. There’s no record of ancient Athenians, however, being as angst-ridden about the future site of the Parthenon as some Brentwood homeowners were about the prospect of this new “acropolis” being erected so close to them on a spot long zoned residential. Their early, deep concerns about height and looks, and the Getty team’s responses to them, play here as a separate drama parallel to planning and construction going forward under girdling conditional use permits.

Nearly from the start of the film, color (or what some perceived to be a lack of it) is an issue over which many close to this project see red. When it comes solely to the looks of the structures he designs, Meier is by reputation a white supremacist. We hear again and again here that he flat out loves white, but also from Walsh that such interior austerity is incompatible with the Getty collection, predominantly European paintings dating from the late Middle Ages to 1900.

This debate will thread much of the film’s narrative, with New York architect Thierry Despont later being hired to design the museum’s textured interiors, and the color issue extending to the new Getty’s outside as well.

“The materials of the exterior of the building were an issue from the very first day I was hired as architect,” Meier tells the filmmakers. Like a tract house buyer making patio and fireplace choices, he is in front of the camera at one point examining sample squares of stone. “Keep this. Keep this.”

Later, the Getty team visits the Italian quarry from which the center’s exterior travertine is imported after being cleaved in sections by a guillotine device.

Besides affirming that hard hats are invaluable artisans in this partnership, the construction process itself is absorbing to watch. “It’s like constructing a building on top of a pinhead,” someone says.

Amid concerns about the grandiose, simple pragmatism also surfaces. Stephen Roundtree, vice president of the Getty Trust, worries aloud at one point that visitors will snag themselves on the stone Meier has mandated for outside benches. “We’re gonna get sued,” he says, later musing that “Richard seems almost to have a hostility toward comfort.”

Soon it’s October 1997, the film has flown by, we’re watching a tapestry being hung on a wall that is not white, hostilities at the Getty seem to have melted and Meier appears elated. “I’m happy to be here,” he says. “I don’t want to leave. I want to keep working on it.”

How long happy faces endure, and just how deep are these battle scars, remain to be seen. Not that it should matter to viewers of “Concert of Wills,” whose ultimate achievement is in capturing the creative process--at once tortuous and exhilarating--through which the container emerges as art along with the contents.

* “Concert of Wills: Making the Getty Center” airs at 8 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28. “Robert Irwin: The Beauty of Questions” airs Friday at 11 p.m. on the same station.